LINGUIST List 13.1864

Sun Jul 7 2002

Qs: Creole Phonology, Eng Middle Contruction

Editor for this issue: Karen Milligan <karenlinguistlist.org>

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Please, I need to find the reference of a PhD dissertation defended at
Cornell University (in the 70ties) by Ian R. Smith over Batticaloa
(Sri Lanka) Portuguese Creole Phonology. Thank you very much.
Prof. Dr. Jean-Pierre Angenot

I am studying the development of the English middle construction such
as:
(1)This shirt irons easily.
In most of the sources I have looked at (Visser, Denison, Lightfoot),
middles are found more in Early Modern English than in Old or Middle
English.
Does anyone have any information on this?
Furthermore, I am also interested in finding examples of middles in
all periods of English. Does anyone know of websites or corpora that
will not tax the meager monetary situation of a (relatively)poor
graduate student?
I'll post a summary.